


Oh, Death

by Never_Says_Die



Category: Walking Dead, Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, M/M, Walking Dead 'Fic Exchange fill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 07:32:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Never_Says_Die/pseuds/Never_Says_Die
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My exchange 'fic for the Walking Dead 'fic exchange on livejournal.  I literally COULD NOT post this sucker on the comm, so I'm putting it here and linking.  </p><p>Prompt was: When they're the only thing left in the world, Glenn and Daryl try to shape it into everything they've always wanted it to be.  </p><p>Major AU with supernatural elements.  Daryl is far, far from human in this :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I literally do not even know where this came from. I basically took the prompt and made it go in some very strange directions, but I really hope the prompter enjoys it all the same.
> 
> The way the prompt was worded put me in a very sweeping, epic, mythical frame of mind. And I'll be honest, I was watching "What Dreams May Come" at the time, and I was like "oh, what if they LITERALLY were changing the world to suit them?" And then it kind of evolved from there into a very supernatural AU. Fair warning, I'm going for kind of a lyrical, mythic feel to a lot of this. Bear with me, okay?
> 
> Title from "Oh Death" by Noah Gunderson

_When Death and all his angels find you  
Will you call out?  
Will you call out?_

He was not born. 

He was never a squalling baby, or a mischievous child. He never clung to a mother’s soft hand, or received a father’s hearty clap on the back. He never went to school, or raced into a living room to see what Santa had left him. He did not grow up. 

He just _is_.

He supposes he always will _be_. He is as old as time itself, though he is technically the youngest of his siblings. There is no part of history he hasn’t witnessed. No period that he has not been a part of.

He is _not_ human.

He watches them, though, walking in their world as though he was really a part of it. Sometimes he lets himself settle, lets others see him and speak to him. He weaves illusions of a real life around him and wears them like costumes, tries to understand what it is that makes these people worthwhile when they have always needed _him_. If they only needed his siblings, it would be a different story. He exists, though, and so he doesn’t see why they deserve any real consideration. He never settles in the world for long.

He knows his brother and sister see something in humans that they have come to love, knows that they spend years and years walking in the humans’ world. His brother and sister live whole lives, real lives, over and over. He never quite understands the appeal…but sometimes he tries. It makes his sister happy, and while he doesn’t think he loves her the way she loves him, he does like to make her happy. 

He is a child of Death—her bloodiest and most dangerous angel. He is the harbinger of the most brutal deaths. Murders. Executions. Suicides. Wars. The souls of those who die by violence are his to collect, and he is well-suited to his work. He wonders, sometimes, if he might be able to understand why his brother and sister enjoy the human world so much if he didn’t see all the viciousness in it, if he had any experience beyond the pain and fear that his deaths were soaked in. He wonders if he could feel something more than a distant sort of fondness for his sister if he hadn’t bathed in blood and screams for all his existence. 

He rarely bothers with those thoughts for long, though.

On the night before the most terrible challenge humans will likely ever face, he meets his brother and sister in the city where it all will start. He knows what will happen, of course. All three of them do. He’s felt it building for a while now: strange, insistent pressure that the humans are all oblivious to. The world is holding its breath, getting ready to _scream_ , and not one of them even notices. He’s seen it before—before plagues and wars and disasters…but it’s never felt this intense. 

The humans will call it the end of the world, the Apocalypse, the hand of whatever god they believe in coming down, clenched into an angry fist. They always do. Even he has to admit, though, that this time they might be right. 

He meets them in a small, out of the way restaurant, on a street that will be silent and littered with corpses in a little under a week. They are sitting at a table on the patio, and he rolls his eyes a little as he realizes they have made themselves visible, real to the world around them. The restaurant they have chosen does have an excellent house lager, though, and so he follows suit. The humans slide neatly around him, never even realizing that the person they are side-stepping has literally just melted into existence there on the sidewalk. He glances over the knots of people going about their lives, lips curling into a grimace of distaste…but his sister is already rising from her seat, waving at him as if he didn’t already know exactly where they are. He plants his hands on the waist-high brick wall that surrounds the restaurant’s patio and boosts himself over, ignoring the startled squawks of a few other patrons. 

His sister smiles beatifically, and runs over to him, throwing her arms around his waist. His sister is beautiful, an eternal child with plump cheeks and shining blonde hair; the harbinger of innocent deaths. Stillborns. Accidents. Sudden illnesses. Her deaths are not always easy…but there is never any malice behind them. She is a sparkling light to his darkness, and for some reason he is her favorite brother. 

He endures her hug dutifully, pats her on the back and lets her take his hand to lead him over to their table. His brother stands as they approach, nodding at him gravely. Everything about his brother is calm, stately. He is the oldest of them, his face that of a man in his sixties, with a head of white hair and eyes that always seem to look straight through you. He is the harbinger of expected deaths. Long sicknesses. Age. He has perhaps the easiest job of the three of them—his deaths are often _welcome_. 

“Little brother,” he says by way of greeting, as their sister slides neatly back into her seat. 

“Old man,” he answers, in exactly the same tone. They don’t have names, per se, though they’ve all occasionally chosen something to be known by. They don’t really have a need for them. He sprawls into his own chair, pleased to see there’s already a glass of the house beer sitting at his place, the sides still rimed with frost. His sister has a glass of something ridiculously bright, fizzy and non-alcoholic (and really, what’s the point in _that_?) in front of her, maraschino cherries and chunks of pineapple bobbing in it like little lifeboats in a sea of pink. 

“I’m going to miss this,” she sighs softly, her gaze turning out onto the street. She is not talking about just the restaurant, or even just the city, and for a moment her eyes are absolutely ancient. It breaks through the façade of the child, and for just that instant she is both a little girl and a tired, old woman. 

“Indeed. I’m going to miss it all,” his brother agrees, stirring cream into the cup of coffee at his elbow. 

There is genuine sadness in their voices, and he watches them curiously as they start reminiscing about places they had visited this century, people they had gotten to know, even TV shows they had enjoyed. It is always this way with them…he can remember a similar conversation held in the shadow of the Roman Coliseum in the days before what the humans would call the Black Death arrived on the shores of Europe. He doesn’t see _why_ they always get so depressed. It’s not as though they need anything the human world can provide. He enjoys some things, certainly—decent alcohol, good music. Once in a great while he finds some book or bit of poetry that entertains him. 

He is not ashamed to admit that he thinks fried Oreos are fucking _brilliant_. 

These are not things he needs, though, and when they all disappear in the next few days, weeks, and months, he is not going to mourn them the way his siblings will. He’s never seen any point in getting attached to anything in this world. He raises his glass to his mouth, taking a long swallow as his sister stirs the chunks of fruit around and around in her drink. 

“You realize you’ll have the lion’s share of the work, don’t you?” his brother asks suddenly, and it takes him a moment to realize the Old Man is talking to him. His brother and sister are both staring at him, his brother’s face inscrutable as always, his sister’s blue eyes full of worry. 

He sets the glass down and leans back in his seat, a feral smile twisting his lips. “Nothin’ new there,” he says, and it’s true.

They will all three be busy in the coming days, but after the initial rush of sickness and infection, the collection will mostly be on _him_. It’s always so…the ones who manage to make it through the first wave of the disaster start attacking each other like wolves. His siblings claim that disaster brings out the very best of humanity, but all he ever sees is the very worst. Of the ones who survive what’s coming, he’d lay odds that well over half of them are going to promptly take the opportunity to devolve into complete animals. There is an orgy of violence in his future—if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that humans get stupidly dangerous when they’re panicking—and they all know it. 

His sister makes a tiny, distressed noise low in her throat. He rolls his eyes again and snatches a laminated menu out of a little metal stand in the center of the table, more to for distraction than out of any real desire for food. “What’s good t’eat here?” he asks brusquely, and ignores the way his brother’s lips thin, the loaded look his siblings exchange while he examines the appetizer section. 

They order calamari and stuffed mushrooms and he lets his sister chatter at him about inconsequential things as they eat. The patrons around them enjoy the warm evening air, utterly unaware that the world is going to have a spectacular go at ending in the next twenty-four hours. The waitress smiles at them, tries to flirt with him a little. She has no idea that in two days the dangerous-looking young man in the battered leather vest will appear in front of her and watch dispassionately as she is torn limb from limb by a mob of shambling monsters that used to be her neighbors, before plucking her soul from her body and ferrying it on to whatever awaits humans _after_. Death’s three children—her harbingers, her faces, her angels—sit and talk for hours, one or the other occasionally vanishing on “business” only to reappear scant seconds later. 

He doesn’t contribute much to the conversation. He never does, and the other two are used to that. His sister doesn’t lose that worried, pinched look in her eyes, but then she always frets and wrings her hands when he’s about to be called up for major duty. She thinks it hurts him, damages him in some way, to do what he does. The thought amuses him occasionally. For all that she loves him, she doesn’t really understand him. He is not like her and their brother, does not feel things the way they do, does not see things the way they do. That’s how it has always been. 

Still…as his siblings watch the world pass by, he watches them. And sometimes, just sometimes, he wishes he could see what they see. 

But he’s never wished for long.


	2. Chapter 2

_When Death and all his angels catch you  
Will you cry out?  
Will you cry out?_

He has never, in all his long existence, seen the kind of chaos that he’s seen in the past few weeks. Not when Rome fell, not when the plague swept through Europe, not in the trenches of the First World War…nothing compares. He’s a little bit impressed, though he doesn’t admit that out loud. His sister is quiet and somber lately, mourning the world she’d actually loved and watching him with miserable eyes as he collects soul after soul from the bloodiest and most violent deaths he’s ever witnessed. He thinks she’s being foolishly emotional—but he doesn’t go out of his way to upset her further. 

The sheer _volume_ of death and destruction they witness in the first few days after the outbreak are staggering. At first they are all equally busy…but it is not long before the initial wave calms. Then, as his brother predicted, the work starts falling more and more to him. The gentle deaths, the innocent deaths, seem to have disappeared along with the humans’ civilization, and all that is left is violence. 

He sets about his work with grim determination and a dark sort of satisfaction. 

He is called to perform his ‘job’ practically every moment of every day, but time is a relative thing for all three of them. He exists in whatever moment he chooses to, for however long he wishes and so when something…interesting…happens during one of his collections, he can afford to stick around and observe. 

It happens in Atlanta, only a few days after the city well and truly falls to the things the humans have started calling Walkers. He is there on business, of course…the same sort of business he has been called to thousands, hundreds of thousands, _millions_ of times over the last few days. A group of humans who somehow managed to survive the initial outbreak are attempting to make it out of the city limits to (relative) safety. 

They are going to fail. 

He feels the pull, the strange little tugging sensation in his head that draws him to those marked as his, and lets himself melt into reality just as the group are about to leave the cover of one of Atlanta’s alleyways and make a mad dash for an abandoned military truck by one of the many failed blockades that litter the city. It’s a scenario he’s seen play out more times than he cares to count, and he shakes his head as he follows the group—five men and three women, several of them in matching uniforms advertising a pizza delivery service—unseen and unheard by any of them. 

He flicks his gaze ahead to the blockade they are heading for, well aware that there are a dozen Walkers hidden from the group’s view by the bulk of the vehicles and the sandbags desperate soldiers piled up before they were overrun. The two men in the lead will not realize the danger until it’s too late, and will go down as soon as they dart around the military truck. The others will scream and panic and try to help their friends, and simply be overwhelmed and ripped to bloody shreds right there in the street when the feeding frenzy draws the attention of another twenty Walkers from further up the block. 

He glances at the humans again, then flicks out of existence and reappears by the truck they are aiming for. The Walkers that will kill the small group are milling around aimlessly, and his lip curls in disgust as one brushes too close to him before shying away. 

The Walkers…disturb him. They never attack him, of course, even though they appear to be aware of him. They avoid him, out of some basic, animal instinct perhaps. There is something so terribly _wrong_ about them, though; shells with no soul, no spark. He deals in the deaths that are by their very nature unnatural, contrary to the order of things. By extension, there is something about him that is unnatural. Contrary. The Walkers, though…the Walkers are an affront to nature, an abomination. He’s not afraid of them—he doesn’t know that he even has it in him to be _afraid_ of something--but he doesn’t spend any more time in their presence than he absolutely has to. 

The first of the group, a black man in his mid-twenties with a cracked pair of wire-rimmed glass on his face and a head of dreadlocks hastily tied back with a bandanna, rounds the vehicle. His name is Dante’ Richards, he was working as a manager in the pizza place most of the group worked at to put himself through law school, and he’s been the de facto leader of this little group for the past two days. He knows these things…he knows everything there is to know about the ones that are his to collect. He knows Dante’ is more terrified than he’s ever been in his life; knows Dante’ is quietly sure that his entire family is dead or worse; knows that he’s desperately in love with his pretty girlfriend (a young woman just behind him with huge green eyes and smooth, mocha-colored skin) and had been planning to ask her to marry him at Christmas this year; knows he is grimly determined to get her and the rest of this group—friends from work and two random survivors they’ve fallen in with—the hell out of the city. 

He knows all these things about Dante’ Richards and none of it matters because Dante’ Richards belongs to him, and now has less than a minute to live. 

Dante’ is crouching stealthily as he goes for the driver’s side of the vehicle. He watches disinterestedly as the man catches sight of the Walkers, as his eyes go wide in horror. One of the Walkers is lunging for him even as he opens his mouth to scream, to warn the others. It hits him full-on, rotted, gore-crusted teeth tearing hungrily at his throat. Blood spurts out in a rush as arteries are severed and all that comes out of his mouth is a pathetic gurgle. 

He steps forward, around the other, rapidly-clustering Walkers. He melts into being in front of the man’s eyes, eyes that suddenly go even wider with new terror. Some deeply buried instinct in these humans always recognizes him for what he is, however much he might look like them. He squats down beside Dante’ Richards as the man thrashes and moans helplessly in the grip of two Walkers, and reaches down to lay his hand on the man’s chest. 

When he draws his hand back, something is clenched in his fist…and Dante’ Richards is gone. He opens his fingers as he stands, staring down at the flickering, pulsing cluster of light that fits into the center of his palm. Humans have almost as many names for it as they have languages: the soul, the essence, the spirit. He doesn’t particularly care what they call it; all he knows is that it’s his job to collect it, and see that it moves on. The light trembles and quivers in his hand, sparking and sizzling with a strange sort of life. 

He’s seen his brother collect souls before…soft, barely-glowing embers like the last flare of a candle about to go out. The souls that find their way to his sister’s hand are gentle, flickering sparks—like fireflies or shooting stars. 

The ones that he collects burn like live coals, scorching him with all the anger and energy of life cut short. 

He is used to it, though, and merely moves to the next victim of the Walker attack. 

The rest of the group is bunched in too close behind Dante’ Richards for anyone to turn and run more than a few steps before the rest of the pack is on them. It’s a bloodbath. A frenzy. He ignores it for the most part…screams of terror, wails of pain, pleas for help that will not come; these are not new things to him. He slips from person to person amidst the Walkers, and reaches for them. 

Michael Gatling: nineteen, ostensibly taking a year off after high school to decide what he wanted to do with his life. Really, he just wanted to smoke pot and hang out with his girlfriend. 

Darcy White: twenty-two, just graduated with a degree in Special Education and was going to teach in the same inner-city district she’d grown up in. She would have said yes when Dante’ Richards asked her to marry him. 

Juan Ramirez: twenty, only following the group because his best friend wouldn’t let him give up. Really, he’d been ready to die the moment he’d seen an Army soldier put a bullet through his fiancée’s head just before she lunged at his throat. 

There are almost twenty Walkers closing in on the group now, the smell of fresh blood and the screams drawing them like moths to a flame. Even in their frenzy, though, the Walkers flinch and skitter away from him as he does his work, gathering the members of the little group. The ball of light in his hands grows larger, brighter, hotter as he moves to kneel from person to person. When he stands again, there are only bodies being ripped to shreds. 

He turns to the last member of the group—and something interesting happens. 

The human is wearing the same delivery uniform as most of the others had been, now blood and sweat-stained, the logo near unrecognizable. He’s tall and slender, of Asian descent, with a baseball cap jammed over his shaggy black hair. He’s one of the younger ones in the group, just barely in his twenties--but he also apparently was one of the smarter ones. Even as he advances towards the kid, the pull that draws him to all his collections, the connection that marks them as his…vanishes. 

He is actually startled, something that _never_ happens, stumbling a little. He shakes his head in confusion, searching for the connection…but no, it’s not there anymore. 

Somehow, some way, the kid has done something—made some choice, come to some realization—that has changed his fate. It happens, of course. Humans do have that whole ‘free will’ thing going for them. It’s not even the first time one of _his_ collections has suddenly changed, though it happens so infrequently he has to struggle to remember the last time…he thinks it might have been back before Rome started expanding its empire. The fact that the kid has thrown off his mark isn’t what startles him. 

It’s the fact that he can see absolutely no fucking way the kid is going to get out of this. 

None. 

There are Walkers everywhere, closing in on him. He hadn’t been bunched in as close with the group, and so he had a bit of maneuvering room when the first Walkers attacked…but there’s nowhere for him to go. His access back to the alley they had come out of is blocked. There are Walkers pouring in from all sides. Less than a minute has passed since he collected the first soul, but the kid’s eyes are narrowed, a grim tilt to his mouth as though he’s already scouted his options and decided on a course of action. 

He has one second to raise an eyebrow, curious despite himself, when the kid bolts straight towards him. Towards the small space in the crowd of Walkers where the things are twitching aside to avoid touching him. 

_Oh._

The kid can’t see him, he knows. He hasn’t materialized fully in this part of reality yet, and he is only otherwise visible to the ones he’s about to take. The kid’s speed is impressive, as is the stoic way he leaps and vaults over the bodies of his fallen friends, deftly twisting to avoid the reaching, grasping hands of the Walkers. If he can make it over the barricade that the vehicles were parked by, he actually has a semi-clear shot to the next alley. 

He’s not sure why he does it. Maybe it’s because the kid has both surprised and impressed him and he can’t remember the last time either happened, let alone both. Maybe it’s some small bit of his sister’s influence. Maybe it’s just that the kid is no longer one of his and he can’t feel any pull that indicates his fate is about to alter again. 

Whatever the reason, he finds himself stepping to one side, forcing the small break in the dozens of Walkers reaching for the kid wider as a few more of them instinctively shuffle out of his path. He hears the kid let out a gasping, desperate cry as he instantly takes advantage of the wider gap, diving between a few Walkers and scrambling up and over the sandbag barricade with barely a break in his stride. 

He has several souls to ferry on. He can already feel the pull in his chest, calling him to dozens, hundreds, thousands of other scenes just like this. His work is _never_ done…but that is more true now than it has ever been before. Nonetheless, he turns and watches as the kid throws himself over the barricade and sprints up the street, dodging around Walkers, debris, and abandoned vehicles gracefully and nimbly. The Walkers not currently feasting on the remains of the kid’s friends start lurching after him, but he can tell they’re not going to catch the kid. 

Impressive. 

But the pull is becoming stronger by the moment, and he has no time to linger. Besides…the kid may have changed his fate today, but more likely than not, that won’t last. He lets himself fade out of reality, but he’s surprised when thoughts of the kid stay with him. 

He’s been surprised and impressed by mortals before…but he doesn’t think he’s ever found one that intrigued him.


End file.
